iWorld

Ronnie Screwvala bets big on Oximity

MUMBAI: Entrepreneurs Ronnie Screwvala, Krishnan Ganesh, Sashi Reddi and Anand Ranganathan have co-invested in Oximity, a unique news website that crowd-sources opinions and developments on social and economic issues at a global level. The four Indian investors have jointly co-invested to raise the seed round of $620,000 for this innovative crowd sourced news website.

Oximity goes beyond commercial concerns and concentrates on the latest trends like social, mobile, location based services, cloud computing and big data. “For Screwvala, Ganesh, Reddi and Ranganathan investing in Oximity and actively supporting it with personal networks is a validation of the website’s attempt to bring in systemic change in the news industry,” said the company statement.

“The news media landscape is shifting rapidly, and in a few years there will be an entirely new set of players dominating this space. We believe Oximity has the potential to be one of such dominant players,” said Ronnie Screwvala.

“The paradigm shift that Oximity is planning is huge. There is a clear and present need to replace the Buzzfeed generation with meaningful journalism direct from the source. Oximity's focus on pertinent news from the community is much-needed and I'm excited to see this collaborative platform grow,” added K Ganesh.

With its modus operandi of crowd-sourcing news, Oximity aims to transform the traditional top-down structure of news media with a bottoms-up approach in writing, reporting, editing and distributing news. By allowing people and organisations to report their news in over 180 languages, and facilitating automatic as well as manual translation, Oximity is removing language as a barrier to the flow of news information globally.

Additionally, it is partnering with various existing user generated news networks worldwide to create one large network of self-empowered news writers and readers.

“We believe all human beings are equal, without exception. The disenfranchised can now have a voice, on a level playing field with the already empowered. And users get to set the news agenda, instead of a few people who run global news media organisations”, said Oximity co-founder Sanjay Goel.

The website has more than 8,000 likes on Facebook and over 6,000 followers on twitter. This only goes on to say that there is space for such news websites where common man becomes the source!